A video that was released by a student of Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina shows a considerate amount of force used against a student during an in-school arrest. On one hand it has sparked the all too familiar internet rage of police brutality – especially on racial terms – but what the incident has brought to light is so much more.
The female student had been reported to the police by the school after she had disrupted a number of classes. This is actually a thing in the US, as schools work with local police departments to discipline unruly children.
As you can see in the video, the students aren’t even slightly perturbed as there is a long history of these incidents, resulting in negative issues for the perpetrators. Around 70% of the kids arrested are likely to be black or Hispanic and the reasons are largely due to socio-economic reasonings as well as a conscious dehumanising and bias toward black people.
When lawmakers began enacting tough-on-crime policies in the 1970s and ’80s, some of the concepts trickled down to schools, which began outsourcing discipline to police through school resource officers and referrals to the juvenile justice system. The result has been a school-to-prison pipeline that acts as many kids’ first exposure to the criminal justice system — and it can lead to more interactions with the justice system later on, because the lost school time and bad marks on their records can make it much more difficult to get ahead.
Obviously, the current system isn’t working.
[source: vox]
